Tsutsui W.M. A Companion to japanese histоry

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suffering on defections, but it was the apostasy of party leaders Sano Manabu and

Nabeyama Sadachika later in 1933 that triggered the torrent of conversions. It is

estimated that 95 percent of those imprisoned renounced their Marxism.

The

degree of sincerity in their renunciations varied considerably, with some converts

becoming active supporters of government policies and others lying low and revert-

ing to Marxism after the war ended.

In any case, the process was a traumatic one that spawned a genre of autobio-

graphical writings known as tenko

literature. Shimaki Kensaku is the best known

among these writers, according to Keene. He wrote stories about the great pressure

to convert that he received from family and friends as well as the police. His long

tenko

novel, Quest for Life, received an enthusiastic response from both the general

public and government in 1938, but Nakamura Mitsuo was critical of the speed with

which tenko

writers rushed into print as well as of the lack of discrimination regarding

literary quality on the part of readers. As he wrote in 1935,

One gets used to anything. And one of the cleverest ways of getting along in this dizzy

age of ours is to get used to everything, no matter how peculiar, as quickly as possible.

Perhaps that is why it does not seem especially strange that there should be a spate of

novels these days by so-called tenko

writers who have described their prison experiences.

But, when one stops to think about it, this is indeed a truly bizarre phenomenon. In the

first place, it is strange that so many authors have been imprisoned. Most of them,

moreover, have left prison at almost exactly the same time, and in less than two or three

months have published accounts of their prison experiences in the form of autobio-

graphical fiction in the major magazines.

Although Nakamura was scoffing at the tenko

writers for commercializing their prison

experiences, rejection of their Marxist principles and social purpose was personally

devastating and spiritually disorienting. It necessitated finding some other principles

and purpose for their literary lives.

The Search for the Lost Home

It was not only tenko

converts who sought a new vision of society and culture during

the middle and late 1930s. Nakamura’s reference to ‘‘this dizzy age of ours’’ points to

a more generalized feeling of disorientation and loss of identity. The ‘‘speed,’’

‘‘tempo,’’ ‘‘jazz,’’ ‘‘light,’’ and ‘‘brightness’’ that were equated with the modern

city were exciting and stimulating, but at the same time isolating and alienating. The

theme of homelessness, both physical and spiritual, arose frequently in writings of the

period.

The poet Hagiwara Sakutaro

is a particularly good example of a writer who sensed

an irretrievable loss and rootlessness in the condition of modernity. His sense of loss is

all the more striking because of his role as the leading poet of the modern style during

the 1920s, a poet who found inspiration in the writings of Western poets such as

Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire. Hagiwara’s poem ‘‘Song of the Wanderer’’

expresses the poet’s inability to find a spiritual home in either past or present, East or

West, city or countryside.

INTELLECTUAL LIFE, CULTURE, AND MODERNITY 199

You! Wanderer!

You who come from the past and go toward the future

seeking eternal nostalgia

how can you shift your worries back and for th

like a clock’s pendulum?

In an earlier poem, ‘‘The Homecoming’’ (Kikyo

), Hagiwara had expressed a loss of

identity with his home in the countryside, but at the same time in ‘‘Nogisaka Club’’

(Nogisaka Kurabu) he wrote about the loneliness and emptiness of life in a fashion-

able district of Tokyo:

Last year I lived in a fifth-floor apartment

in a vast Western-style room

I pushed my bed up against the wall and slept alone.

What is it that troubles me?

Already weary of the emptiness of life

must I now starve like some beast of burden?

I have lost nothing

but I have lost everything.

In 1937 Hagiwara wrote a poem entitled ‘‘Return to Japan’’ (Nihon e no kaiki) that

seemed to signal an end to his wandering and homelessness, and he joined the

Romantic School (Romanha), a group described by Kevin Doak as writers who

sought to fulfil their ‘‘dreams of difference’’ from the West. The title of Hagiwara’s

poem became a slogan taken up by many writers and critics of the late 1930s, and it

has served as an umbrella for what were actually quite diverse answers to the problem

of ‘‘overcoming modernity’’ that came toge ther in the 1942 symposium by that

name. Before exam ining that discourse, however, we will look at other attempts to

solve the problem of homelessness and a sense of discontinuity with the past and

tradition.

Marxists were not the only ones who tur ned away from Western cultural values and

ideas. Leading modernist writers, such as Yokomitsu and Kawabata, gradually aban-

doned modernism. Yokomitsu became absorbed with the meaning of being Japanese,

particularly after an extended trip to Europe as a newspaper correspondent in 1936.

Kawabata also gave up mod ernism and wrote novels that have given him a reputation

for being a ‘‘Japanese’’ writer. He joined government-sponsor ed writers’ or ganiza-

tions before and during the war and never published political or social views that

offended the government. Nevertheless, Kawabata’s works do not exhibit a ‘‘linear

‘return to the East ’,’’ but rather a constant move back and forth between East and

West.

He continued, for example, to use stream-of- consciousn ess techniques and

surrealistic imagery.

Moreover, even after 1937 he published articles insisting on

freedom of speech and a spirit of rebelliousness against social conventions. He

declared that ‘‘without a rebellion against conventional morality ther e can be no

‘pure literature’.’’

Among aesthetics theorists, we have already seen Tanizaki’s wistful mourning for

the decline of traditional Japanese tastes and standards of female beauty. During the

1930s Tanizaki remained in the Kansai area, away from the modernity of Tokyo,

wrote The Makioka Sisters (Sasameyuki) about an old Osaka family, and rendered the

200 ELISE K. TIPTON

Heian classic, The Tale of Genji, into modern Japanese. This return to traditional

Japanese subjects was not deemed sufficiently supportive of the war by government

authorities, who banned The Makioka Sisters, and certain critics regarded the trans-

lation of The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese as a contamination of the original

work and a pandering to the masses.

Kuki Shu

is another prominent theoretician of aesthetics who is often presented

as an example of the ‘‘return to Japan.’’ During the 1920s Kuki spent a long time

assimilating European culture and philosophy, which he taught on his return to Japan

and appointment at Kyoto University. During the 1930s, however, Kuki became

known for his valorization of the Edo taste for iki, a difficult-to-translate term that

encompasses ‘‘chic,’’ ‘‘smart,’’ and ‘‘refined’’ all at once. Despite this apparent

‘‘return to Japan,’’ Nakano Hajimu argues that Kuki in fact attempted to unify

Occidental and Oriental ways of thought. According to Nakano, this distinguishes

Kuki from his colleague Watsuji Tetsuro

and the thinkers of the Kyoto School of

philosophy, who evaluated traditional Japanese culture more highly and had a greater

concern with social and pol itical issues.

Yanagita Kunio was also a critic of modernity who turned to the Japanese past for

solutions to the problems of modernity, but he went deeper into the past than Kuki.

Other thinkers, such as O

kawa Shu

mei, Tachibana Kosaburo

, and Gondo

Seikei, also

developed theories rejecting the modernity of the city, but because their theories were

more directly linked to political activism, they are not examined here. Yanagita’s

concerns were social rather than aesthetic, but his solution ended up being a cultural

rather than economic or political one. Travelling to remote villages and the geograph-

ical periphery of Okinawa, places that were least touched by modernization, Yanagita

collected folk tales and constructed the concept of jo

min (abiding folk), an imaginary

folk who were complete and unchanging, ‘‘everywhere and nowhere.’’ He argued that

through folklore studies or ethnology (minzokugaku), the religious and spiritual life of

the jo

min would be reconstituted and counter the disruption of communal life caused

by modern technology and the bureaucratic penetration of the countryside.

The ‘‘Overcoming Modernity’’ Symposium

Many intellectuals did not find Yanagita’s new nativism able to restore their sense of

wholeness and stability, largely because their interests focused on literate culture and

the social changes of the city rather than on rural society and oral tradition. Neither

did the war provide a common purpose to end the debates over mod ernity. And,

although many intellectuals took up Hagiwara’s call to ‘‘return to Japan,’’ the results

of the 1942 ‘‘Overcoming Mode rnity’’ symposium reve al an inability to form a

consensus on the complex issues of modernity. This is not surprising given the diverse

backgrounds of the participants: novelists, poets, literary and film cr itics, philo-

sophers, composers, scientists, psychologists, and historians. Although they generally

represented three groups – the Kyoto School of philosophy, the Romantic School,

and the Literary Society (Bungakkai) – none of these groups were unified in their

view of mod ernity. Like the European symposia upon which the Japanese one was

modelled,

participants failed even to agree on a definition of modernity, much less

on ways to overcome it.

INTELLECTUAL LIFE, CULTURE, AND MODERNITY 201

Some, such as former Marxists Hayashi Fusao and Kamei Katsuichiro

of the

Romantic School, blamed the introduction of modernity from the West for the loss

of native Japanese spirit. Kamei saw Western egoism and rationality as the ‘‘poisons of

civilization’’ and called for a return to belief in the gods (kami) and ‘‘our classics,’’

although he was still not sure that this would solve the problems of modernity. The

leader of the Romantics, Yasuda Yo

, had a stronger belief in the restorative value

of the classics, but as Doak points out, members of the Romantic School defined

modernity in various ways: ‘‘at times it represented a foreig n influence – the West; at

other times it referred to the Meiji state and its ideology of ‘civilization and enlight-

enment’; and at still others it referred to the reality of Japanese culture in its only

existent (if decadent) form.’’

In addition, although Hayashi and others targeted

Americanism for the spread of crass, hedonistic materialism among modern girls and

boys, the Romantics still ‘‘privileged youth and its enthusiasm for imagining a better

future, while utilizing the past as a means of negating the present.’’

This was

proclaimed in the first issue of their journal: ‘‘We have taken up the lofty tune of

the youth of our age and, rejecti ng faddish and vulgar literature, step forward without

regret in the declaration of the noble and liberating action of the artist.’’

Other participants in the symposium disagreed more strongly with Hayashi and

Kamei about equating modernity with the West. Nishitani Keiji of the Kyoto School,

for example, regarded modernity a s a universal problem stemming from the French

Revolution, if not earlier. The prominent literary critic Kobayashi Hide o condemned

utilitarian bureaucratism, functional specialization, and mass production and con-

sumerism like Hayashi, but rejected the idea that the problems of modernity were the

result of Western influence and that reviving the Japanese classics would solve the

problems. In 1933 he had written:

It is a fact that ours is a literature of the lost home, that we are young people who have

lost our youthful innocence. Yet we have something to redeem our loss. We have finally

become able, without prejudice or distortion, to understand what is at the core of

Western writing. With us Western literature has begun to be presented fairly and

accurately. At this juncture, it is indeed pointless to call out for the ‘‘Japanese spirit’’

or the ‘‘Eastern spirit.’’ Look wherever we might such things will not be found.

Kobayashi was pessimistic in the end about finding a way to overcome modernity. His

dilemma characterized the debates during the two days of the ‘‘Overcoming Mod-

ernity’’ symposium, and the moderator Kawakami Tetsutaro

admitted its failure

either to define modernity or to find ways to ove rcome it.

Conclusion

The lingering contentions and confused outcome of the symposium reflected the

nature of debates over modernity among intellectuals and social commentators

throughout the interwar decades. Most agreed with the government’s critique of

modernity, as depicted in the Manga cartoon that appeared two months before the

symposium, but at the same time none suggested giving up the conveniences of

modern science and technology. What they often condemned was the spiritual and

202 ELISE K. TIPTON

cultural consequences of modern technology, efficien cy and rationality – the loss of

creativity resulting from commodification of culture, the sense of homelessness and

loss of communal life resulting from the break with traditional tastes and values, and

disorientation in an age of constant change. The mod ern boy and especially the

modern girl epitomized these challenges posed by modernity and, in addition,

represented modernity’s challenge to accepted gender roles and the centrality of

the family.

The critique of modernity intensified during the 1930s, but intellectuals and social

critics never resolved their differences over the meaning of modernity and, conse-

quently, could not agree about ways to overcome it. Supporting the war against the

Anglo-American powers could not restore a sense of wholeness for many intellectuals

because modernity was not a superficial Western import. And, in fact, their sense of

alienation and isolation was a condition of modernity shared by their counterparts in

Europe and the United States. In one sense, then, they were ‘‘overcome by modern-

ity,’’ to use Haroot unian’s words. But from their reflections on the experience of

‘‘modern life,’’ we gain insights into the crucial transformations in Japanese society

and culture during the interwar decades. And, from their propose d solutions, we see

how sensitive observers everywhere have struggled to confront the challenges of

modern social change.

NOTES

1 Najita and Harootunian, ‘‘Japanese Revolt against the West.’’

2 Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, p. 95.

3 Quoted in Soviak, ‘‘Tsuchida Kyo

son,’’ p. 87.

4 For a reproduction of the cartoon, see Dower, War without Mercy, p. 191.

5 Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, p. 42.

6 Kinmonth, The Self-Made Man.

7 Ibid., p. 68.

8 Quoted in Oka, ‘‘Generational Conflict,’’ p. 197.

9 Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, p. 98.

10 Sand, ‘‘The Cultured Life as Contested Space.’’

11 Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, pp. 14, 6.

12 Sand, ‘‘The Cultured Life as Contested Space,’’ p. 112.

13 Silverberg, ‘‘The Modern Girl as Militant,’’ p. 250.

14 Translated in Sato, The New Japanese Woman, p. 55 (italics in translation).

15 Quoted ibid., p. 72 (italics in translation).

16 Translated in Silverberg, ‘‘Marxism Addresses the Modern,’’ pp. 139–40.

17 The following section on the magazine is based on Tipton, ‘‘Sex in the City.’’

18 Tipton, ‘‘The Cafe

,’’ pp. 119–20.

19 Silverberg, ‘‘The Modern Girl as Militant,’’ pp. 248–9.

20 Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, p. 28.

21 Ibid., pp. 28–9, 33.

22 Keene, Dawn to the West, pp. 795–7.

23 Roden, ‘‘Taisho

Culture and the Problem of Gender Ambivalence,’’ p. 55.

24 Ibid., p. 54.

25 Ibid., pp. 54–5.

26 Keene, Dawn to the West, p. 512.

27 Ibid., p. 521.

INTELLECTUAL LIFE, CULTURE, AND MODERNITY 203

28 Quoted in Keene, Dawn to the West , p. 522.

29 Ibid., p. 513.

30 Starrs, ‘‘Writing the National Narrative,’’ p. 216.

31 Ibid., p. 214.

32 For the distinction between ‘‘civilization’’ (bunmei) and ‘‘culture’’ (bunka), see Haroo-

tunian, ‘‘Introduction: A Sense of an Ending and the Problem of Taisho

.’’

33 Keene, Dawn to the West, pp. 588–9.

34 Ibid., p. 659.

35 Ibid., p. 615.

36 Ibid., p. 847.

37 Quoted ibid., pp. 880–1.

38 ‘‘Hyo

hakusha no uta,’’ translated in Doak, Dreams of Difference, p. 44.

39 Excerpted from the translation in Doak, Dreams of Difference, p. 45.

40 Keene, Dawn to the West, p. 662.

41 Ibid., p. 810.

42 Starrs, ‘‘Writing the National Narrative,’’ p. 223.

43 Quoted in Keene, Dawn to the West , p. 803.

44 Nakano, ‘‘Kuki Shu

,’’ pp. 271–2.

45 Harootunian, ‘‘Figuring the Folk,’’ pp. 146, 150; Hashimoto, ‘‘Chiho

,’’ pp. 138–42.

46 Doak, Dreams of Difference, p. 135. For more detailed analysis on the European symposia

and their impact on Japanese writers, see Vidovic-Ferderbar, ‘‘In Limine.’’

47 Doak, Dreams of Difference, pp. xvi, 138.

48 Ibid., p. xxxvii.

49 Translated in ibid., p. xxxvii.

50 Translated in Anderer, Literature of the Lost Home, p. 54.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderer, Paul. Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo – Literary Criticism, 1924–1939.

Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995.

Doak, Kevin M. Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity.

Berkeley: University of Califor nia Press, 1994.

Dower, John. War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. London: Faber and

Faber, 1986.

Gonda Yasunosuke. ‘‘Modan seikatsu to hentai shiko

sei.’’ Kaizo

11 (1929): 32–6.

Harootunian, H. D. ‘‘Introduction: A Sense of an Ending and the Problem of Taisho

.’’ In H.

D. Harootunian and Bernard Silberman, eds., Japan in Crisis: Essays on Taisho

Democracy.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974.

Harootunian, H. D. ‘‘Figuring the Folk: History, Poetics, and Representation.’’ In Stephen

Vlastos, ed., Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan. Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1998.

Harootunian, H. D. Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar

Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Hashimoto Mitsuru. ‘‘Chiho

: Yanagita Kunio’s ‘Japan’.’’ In Stephen Vlastos, ed., Mirror of

Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press,

1998.

Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era, vol. 1, Fiction. New

York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984.

Kinmonth, Earl. The Self-Made Man in Meiji Japanese Thought: From Samurai to Salary Man.

Berkeley: University of Califor nia Press, 1981.

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Najita, Tetsuo, and Harootunian, H. D. ‘‘Japanese Revolt against the West: Political and

Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth Century.’’ In Peter Duus, ed., The Cambridge History

of Japan, vol. 6, The Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Nakano Hajimu. ‘‘Kuki Shu

and The Structure of Iki.’’ In J. Thomas Rimer, ed., Culture and

Identity: Japanese Intellectuals during the Interwar Years. Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1990, pp. 261–72.

Oka Yoshitake. ‘‘Generational Conflict after the Russo-Japanese War.’’ In Tetsuo Najita and

Victor Koschmann, eds., Conflict in Modern Japanese History. Princeton: Princeton Univer-

sity Press, 1982.

Roden, Donald. ‘‘Taisho

Culture and the Problem of Gender Ambivalence.’’ In J. Thomas

Rimer, ed., Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals during the Interwar Years. Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1990.

Sand, Jordan. ‘‘The Cultured Life as Contested Space.’’ In Elise K. Tipton and John Clark,

eds., Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s. Honolulu:

University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000.

Sato, Barbara. The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

Silverberg, Miriam. ‘‘Marxism Addresses the Modern: Nakano Shigeharu’s Reproduction of

Taisho

Culture.’’ In J. Thomas Rimer, ed., Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals

during the Interwar Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Silverberg, Miriam. ‘‘The Moder n Girl as Militant.’’ In Gail Lee Bernstein, ed., Recreating

Japanese Women, 1600–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

Soviak, Eugene. ‘‘Tsuchida Kyo

son and the Sociology of the Masses.’’ In J. Thomas Rimer, ed.,

Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals during the Interwar Years. Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1990.

Starrs, Roy. ‘‘Writing the National Narrative: Changing Attitudes toward Nation-Building

among Japanese Writers, 1900–1930.’’ In Sharon Minichiello, ed., Japan’s Competing

Modernities. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998.

Tanizaki Jun ichiro

. In Praise of Shadows, trans. Thomas J. Harper and Edward Seidensticker.

New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1977.

Tipton, Elise K. ‘‘The Cafe

: Contested Space of Modernity in Interwar Japan.’’ In Elise Tipton

and John Clark, eds., Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s.

Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000.

Tipton, Elise K. ‘‘Sex in the City: Chastity vs Free Love in Interwar Japan.’’ Intersections:

Gender, History, and Culture in the Asian Context 11 (Aug. 2005) <http://wwwsshe.mur-

doch.edu.au/intersections/issue11/tipton.html> accessed Mar. 1, 2006.

Vidovic-Ferderbar, Dragica. ‘‘In Limine: Writers, Culture and Modernity in Interwar Japan.’’

Ph.D. dissertation, University of Sydney, 2004.

FURTHER READING

J. Thomas Rimer’s collection of essays, Cultu re and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals

during the Interwar Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), sought to

draw attention to the intellectual history of moder n Japan as seen in cultural criticism,

which had been relatively neglected outside Japan. Amon g the contributors to that

volume, H. D. Harootunian stands out as the most promin ent and prolific historian

who has focused on intellectuals’ concerns with the problems of modernity during

the interwar period. His most recent book on the subject, Overcome by Modernity:

History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton Univer-

sity Press, 2000), examines Japanese intellectuals’ reflections on ‘‘modern life,’’

INTELLECTUAL LIFE, CULTURE, AND MODERNITY 205

focusing on the ‘‘mutual imbrication’’ between politics and culture and bet ween

modernism and fascism.

There are numerous studies on individuals and groups in the fields of literature,

philosophy, and art. These approach their subjects from their specific disciplinary

perspectives, but they often focus on problems of identity and nationalism. Donald

Keene’s massive Dawn to the West (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984)

provides a compr ehensive introduction to individual writers and literary movements.

Works on philosophy include James Heisig and John Maraldo, eds., Rude Awaken-

ings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism (Honolulu: University of

Hawai i Press, 1994), and Lesley Pincus, Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan:

Kuki Shu

and the Rise of National Aesthetics (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1996). Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s

(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), edited by Elise K. Tipton and John

Clark, includes several chapters on developments in art and design. On tenko

, see

Patricia Steinhoff, Tenko

: Ideology and Societal Integration in Prewar Japan (New

York: Garland, 1991).

206 ELISE K. TIPTON

CHAPTER TWELVE

External Relations

Frederick R. Dickinson

Why have we Japanese, in this way, been driven to war after war over a span of three

generations?

Historians of modern Japan confront a host of profound questions. For those writing

immediately following World War II, perhaps none was more pivotal than the

debate over the causes of Japan’s modern wars. Early postwar American specialists

of Japanese history devoted their professional careers to analyzing the diplomatic

and political causes of war-making in Japan. By contrast, through the mid-

1970s, mainstream Japanese scho larship identified internal political and economic

‘‘contradictions’’ as the pre-eminent source of Japanese external aggression. As the

momentum for serious analysis of external affairs grew in Japan, American specialists

of Japan followed the international migration toward intellectual, social, and cult ural

history.

Despite the somewhat bumpy road of postwar writing on Japanese external affairs,

international historians in both English- and Japanese-speaking academe continue to

produce vital work on modern Japan. In many ways, they have ad apted their schol-

arship to reflect trends in the more favored fields of social, cultural, and intellectual

history. Although the number of historians trained in international history has

declined dramatically in recent years, the best new scholarship continues to demon-

strate the profound significance of analyses of external affairs for the understanding of

modern Japanese history.

‘‘Kaikoku,’’ ‘‘Civilization,’’ and Contingency

The most enduring trend of postwar scholarship on Japanese external affairs remains

the refutation of the essential outlines of the ‘‘progressive’’ orthodoxy of the early

postwar years. That orthodoxy defined the Tokugawa era as ‘‘feudal,’’ the Meiji

Restoration as an ‘‘incomplete revolution,’’ and the modern era as marked by the

steadily expanding power of a military-bureaucratic state, whose antiquated political

and economic relationships led Japan invariably to wars of conquest and, ultimately,

‘‘fascism.’’

Integral to the progressive vision of the early modern period was the idea of a

‘‘closed country’’ (sakoku), whose insularity from the outside world lay at the heart of

A Companion to Japanese History

Edited by William M. Tsutsui

the stunted political and economic development considered critical in the ultimate

path to war. But in a seminal 1984 study, Ronald Toby epitomized growing scholarly

recognition that, despite bans on trade with Spanish and Portuguese merchants and

measures to prevent unauthorized Japanese contact with the outside world, Toku-

gawa Japan maintained an active trade and diplomacy, particularly with its Asian

neighbors.

Ever since, the principal thrust of Japanese and A merican scholarship

on Tokugawa era external relations has been to document the expansive nature of

Japanese contacts with the outer world.

Michael Auslin finds shrewd bakufu en-

gagement with the Western powers even in an era typically defined as one of shogunal

incompetence, the waning years of the dynasty following Commodore Matthew

Perry’s arrival in 1853.

Like the story of a ‘‘closed’’ Tokugawa polity, the idea of a Meiji regime

steeped more in ‘‘feudal’’ Asian than ‘‘modern’’ Western values long sustain ed the

narrative of political and econo mic difficulties ultimately leading to unprecedented

aggression abroad. But international historians increasingly view Japan’s projection

of power in the nineteenth century less as the product of aber rant ‘‘feudal’’

impulses than as a bid for inclusion in a modern, universal global system. Recent

work on mid-nineteenth-century expansion highlights a meticulous Japanese atten-

tion to international norms.

On nineteenth- and early twentieth-century

relations with Korea, Peter Duus echoes Hilary Conroy’s classic emphasis upon

national securit y but also places Japanese expansion squarely within the international

vogue of empire-building. Wayne Patterson characterizes Japanese attempts to con-

trol recalcitrant Korean nationals in Hawaii as a demonstration of its diplomatic

competence and authority. Ishikawa Hiroshi describes Meiji Japan’s mid-nine-

teenth-century overtures toward Korea as attempts to adhere to international law,

and both Unno Fukuju and Alexis Dudden detail the path toward annexation in

similar terms.

Meiji Japan’s wars have also assumed a more benevolent tone compared to the

accusatory tenor of early postwar Japanese scholarship. The long maligned foreign

minister during the China engagement, Mutsu Munemitsu, emerged as a conscien-

tious professional when his memoirs were republished in Japanese and English in the

late 1960s and early 1980s, respectively.

Recent biographies of Mutsu accentuate

this image.

On Japanese continental policy at the turn of the century, Tsunoda Jun long ago

stressed the geopolitical challenges posed by an eastward-expanding Russia. Kitaoka

Shin’ichi followed by replacing the story of a military-bureaucratic juggernaut with

the tale of nuanced debates within the imperial army. More recently, Stewart Lone has

characterized army elder Katsura Taro

as a circumspect soldier, politician and empire-

builder.

Among the most measured visions of Japanese diplomacy in the first part of the

twentieth century has been the story of Japan’s relationship with Great Britain. By

subtitling his original study of the Anglo-Japanese alliance ‘‘The Diplomacy of Two

Island Empires,’’ Ian Nish offered powerful exception to the more prominent asso-

ciation of Japan with aggressive continental expansion.

The hundredth anniversary

of the alliance spurred a series of new studies by Nish and an impressive roste r of

British and Japanese specialists, which, by its very scope, underscored the idea of

Japan as a ‘‘Britain of the East.’’

World War I has become a new arena to showcase a

208 FREDERICK R. DICKINSON